"La Vista de la Vieja Dama"

By Monica Westin

The fifth biennial Latino Theatre Festival at the Goodman, is centerpieced by “The Sins of Sor Juana,” which has been getting mixed reviews, but the real surprises of the festival’s lineup are two performances by Teatro Buendía. The theater company, one of the most highly regarded in Cuba, has never performed in the US before this month. Newcity spoke with Goodman Artistic Associate Henry Godinez, festival curator, about Teatro Buendía’s style, getting the theater into the country, and revolution.

How did you first become familiar with Teatro Buendía?

The company has played all over the world—Africa, Europe, Australia, obviously Central and South America, even the Globe in London. I first saw them in Cuba in 2003, and I had hoped to bring them to the festival back then, but it was just impossible to bring artists from Cuba under the last political administration. This year, with Obama in the White House, we thought we’d try again and we succeeded… they have their visas, and they fly in tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Malaya Rivera Drew and Dion Mucciacito/Photo: Liz Lauren

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It speaks volumes about the sad state of human affairs when we can describe the story of the repression and destruction of a great, brilliant woman as fairly predictable fare. Predictable perhaps, but still poignant, especially in light of the continuing unabashed cruelty toward women in parts of the Islamic world even today. Perhaps we tsk-tsk these “uncivilized” cultures a bit too much, for it wasn’t long ago that it was Western culture, with the royal court and the Catholic Church at its core, that destroyed many a great woman (and man, for that matter), in the name of God or king.

So even if there is a familiar Joan-like arc to “The Sins of Sor Juana,” now playing at the Goodman, the particulars of the story of this great poet of Mexico are not as widely known. Brilliant, dynamic and beautiful from a young age, Juana Inés de la Cruz was pre-destined for trouble, and in playwright Karen Zacarías’ fairly straightforward imagining of the circumstances of her life, she finds it. Set at the moment when Juana starts to “lose her voice” thanks to the Church’s inability to abide by its promise to let her write, “The Sins” unfolds in a conventional overlapping story line, with an interwoven flashback that explains how Juana came to the Church and, more importantly perhaps, how she found the raw romantic emotions, both conventional and mildly Sapphic, that would manifest so powerfully in her poems. Read the rest of this entry »

Heather Wood

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In an ambitious departure from the topical, highly contemporary milieu she’s become known for (most recently evidenced in finest form with “The Crowd You’re In With”), Rebecca Gilman’s “A True History of the Johnstown Flood,” now in its world premiere at the Goodman Theatre,  strives, mostly successfully, to reveal layers of truths about the times we live in through the retrospective craft of a giant historic epic.

A touring second-generation “first family of theater,” the Baxters (Cliff Chamberlain as Richard, Heather Wood as Fanny and Stephen Louis Grush as James, all in fine turns) find their lives and careers intersecting with the vast wealth of the Lippincotts, represented in compelling embodiments of noblesse oblige by Janet Ulrich Brooks as the benevolent patron and Lucas Hall as her son, Walter. When the manmade mountain lake that provides recreation for the rich floods and destroys the working-class town of Johnstown below (in reality, killing more than 2,200 people in 1889, the most devastating disaster in U.S. history at the time),  the play takes a definitive shift in tone. The humorous, airy comedy of manners that makes up the first act suddenly becomes a tragedy that overtly echoes the devastation of Hurricane Katrina. Read the rest of this entry »

Greta Honold and Tom Hardy/Photo: Liz Lauren

Expectations were especially high for the world premiere of Brett C. Leonard’s “The Long Red Road” at the Goodman, thanks to the Chicago directing debut of Oscar-winning actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and the casting of rising British film and stage star Tom Hardy in a leading role written for him. And I am pleased to say that the set and lighting design meet those expectations, with the Owen Theatre converted by Eugene Lee into a sprawling thrust stage that squeezes right up to the audience, devouring seats and eliminating the opportunity to establish any distance from the tortuous fare unfolding upon it. It’s a magnificent fusion of two separate households headed by two brothers in two separate states (literally and metaphorically), including not only bedrooms, bathrooms and kitchens, but also their places of occupation, a barn and a bar, respectively, the latter where the alcoholic brother Sam spends much of his time communing with the bartender. The homes are interconnected, and characters pass each other like ghosts, suggesting the invisible ties that perpetually bind, even strangle, families. And Edward Pierce’s lighting design is a simple marvel; lamps, across the vast stage, turn on and off to signal the flow of action; the beginning and the end of scenes on a set with no boundaries.

If only the play lived up to its setting, or even its opening, where the audience is greeted by the characters Sam and Annie enjoying a graphic and vigorous shag. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the press release from the Goodman:

MARY ZIMMERMAN REIMAGINES BERNSTEIN’S CANDIDE IN A MAJOR FALL MUSICAL EVENT;
ROBERT FALLS RE-EXAMINES CHEKHOV’S THE SEAGULL; PLUS NEW WORKS BY SARAH RUHL,
REGINA TAYLOR AND THOMAS BRADSHAW HEADLINE GOODMAN THEATRE’S 2010/2011 SEASON

***THE GOODMAN CELEBRATES A DECADE OF ACHIEVEMENTS AS ANCHOR OF THE NORTH LOOP

THEATRE DISTRICT, STARTING WITH A SEPT. 27 EVENT AT THE ART INSTITUTE’S MODERN WING*** Read the rest of this entry »

Krapp's Last Tape/Photo: Liz Lauren

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The constant level of high-quality theater to be had on both the Equity and non-Equity levels in Chicago is nothing short of astonishing, to be sure, but every now and then a performance comes along that manages to stand in a class all by itself. Such is the case with the double-bill of two one-act masterpieces by two fascinatingly different yet similarly iconic twentieth-century playwrights of Irish descent, Eugene O’Neill and Samuel Beckett, performed by a single extraordinary Irish-American actor—Brian Dennehy—who came up with the inspired idea of pairing and performing these two works together.

The Dennehy/O’Neill alliance originated under Robert Falls at Goodman nearly a quarter of a century ago and climaxed with last season’s O’Neill Festival which spotlighted the Dennehy/O’Neill/Falls “Desire Under the Elms.” In fact, Dennehy and Falls actually presented “Hughie”—a forty-minute work O’Neill wrote during the period of his greatest genius at the end of his life as part of a planned series of short plays that became a rara avis when he destroyed the other entries—just six years ago, at that time simply allowing it to stand on its own.

That experience proved inadequate enough that Dennehy began experimenting with adding another one-act to be paired with “Hughie” at other venues, initially settling upon a comedic Sean O’Casey opus that Falls came and saw and thought was a mismatch that trivialized O’Neill. It was Dennehy who finally came up with “Krapp’s Last Tape,” a forty-five-minute Samuel Beckett work also from the period of his greatest genius, as a bookend for “Hughie,” and that configuration was presented two summers ago at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, with Falls directing “Hughie,” Canadian director Jennifer Tarver helming “Krapp’s Last Tape” and Dennehy in both. A huge success, that experience has been enlarged and brought to Chicago, with New York and national tour aspirations. Read the rest of this entry »

Jennifer Tarver/Photo: Liz Lauren

This week Goodman opens its highly anticipated marriage of two one-acts about aging, regret and mourning lost choices:  Eugene O’Neill’s “Hughie” and Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape.” The lineup of artists involved is formidable: Robert Falls continues his collaboration with Brian Dennehy in “Hughie,” who plays against Joe Grifasi in this play about the ways we deceive ourselves in order to go on. This act about the tragedy of “just going on” culminates in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” Beckett’s masterpiece of a one-man show about an aging performer who confronts his early self through recorded diaries that painfully chronicle a lost love. “Krapp’s Last Tape” relies on the contrast between the youthful hope in the tapes and the decayed abjection of older Krapp—also played by Dennehy and directed by Toronto-based director Jennifer Tarver.

Tarver, who directed Dennehy in the play at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival two years ago, is no Beckett newbie. She garnered acclaim for her curation of five Beckett shorts in 2006, and with a background in music as well as dramaturgy, she’s an easy match for the musicality and rhythm of Beckett’s prose. Newcity talked with Tarver the week before previews about space, composition and the demands of directing Beckett. Read the rest of this entry »

The Addams Family at The Oriental/Photo: Samuel Adams

By Brian Hieggelke

As the wind blows the snow sideways this December evening, the weatherman is telling Chicagoans to stay bunkered; the deserted downtown streets reflect their obedience. All save the sidewalk near the intersection of State and Randolph, as TV crews jockey for faces on the red carpet in front of the Ford Center for the Performing Arts Oriental Theatre, where more than 2,000 patrons, including a who’s who of backstage Broadway, are gathering for the world premiere of a new musical featuring a AAA list of talent, onstage and off. “The Addams Family,” with multiple Tony winners Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in its leads, a book from the librettists of “Jersey Boys” and so on, is certainly Broadway bound, but tonight—tonight—Chicago is the center of theater in the world.

That’s the story of Chicago theater in the zeroes: the decade in which it grew up and got big. Whether it’s the launch and monumental success of Broadway In Chicago, the maturation and astonishing quality of a remarkable number of small and mid-sized companies or the increasing demand for Chicago product and Chicago talent on Broadway, Chicago theater has fully come into its own. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2006/07 season brought the grand opening of the new Victory Gardens Biograph Theater, following more than $11 million in renovations

Annoyance Theatre (founded 1987)
“We don’t really have a regular operating budget—just plan as we go along.”
—Jennifer Estlin, President, Annoyance Theatre

The Artistic Home (founded 1998)
End of nineties: $62,000
End of zeroes: $164,500

Bailiwick Chicago (founded 2009)
End of nineties: N/A (Bailiwick Repertory is now defunct)
End of zeroes: $120,000 projected 2010

Chicago Dramatists (founded 1979)
End of nineties: $171,000
End of zeroes: $550,000

Collaboraction (founded 1996)
End of nineties: $50,000
End of zeroes: $500,000

Court Theatre (founded 1955)
End of nineties: $2.6 million
End of zeroes: $3.2 million Read the rest of this entry »

2000

Milestones

500 Clown, Steep Theatre, the side project and Teatro Luna are founded

Broadway In Chicago launches as a joint venture between Live Nation and the Nederlander Organization

Goodman departs its original home in the Art Institute of Chicago and moves into $51 million new digs in the North Loop

Chicago Shakespeare moves into a $24 million theater on Navy Pier

Collaboraction produces its first Sketchbook

The City of Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs opens The Storefront Theater

Passings

Michael Maggio, Goodman Theatre Associate Artistic Director and Dean of The Theatre School at DePaul University Read the rest of this entry »